If this is a hard requirement for federation, then I guess federated services are not for me, as I value my privacy more than I care to use them.

How do you know who you're defederating with? When I set up my instance, the list of federated instances was thousands. How do you know which one is scraping the data?

Admin access means nothing if you can set up your own instance in an afternoon, federate with everything, then get all the votes copied to your database. I have done this just to prove it could be done, btw.

My family had a trailer growing up and ours was stolen from in front of our house. It was never found.

My mom got run into by a trailer that was rolling down a hill. Luckily my mom decided she was a superhero that day and was able to push the trailer to the curb to stop it from rolling down any further (it was a pretty steep hill). She got away with only a broken ankle.

So I say yeah. Tell them.

Maga Man X on the SNES. I still vividly remember the first time I ever beat a boss in it, too. I remember running out of my room to look down the loft to the living room area and screamed to my mom that I finally beat Chill Penguin. She wasn't impressed. I immediately went back to my room and beat another boss. Then another. After probably a couple of years of just dying over and over, something clicked that day, and I was able to beat all the bosses. And I have been hooked on gaming ever since.

I just got 100% on Nier Automata, and I only loved it more as I played it more. Usually I hate any grinding in any game and will either skip any content that requires grinding, use mods to bypass it, or just put down the game and move on to another one. But the whole game just felt so damn good. I could just walk around for hours doing nothing because the movement felt so good.

There was quite a bit of grinding, but I didn't find any of it too bad. I got 100% in about 50 hours, which is my sweet spot. Any longer and I feel like the game is dragging on.

I think the devs like this design. They are currently contemplating making votes public for everyone. There is a discussion on their GitHub about it. They opened the discussion and asked if the users want to make all votes visible on the UI. If it happens, I will probably stop voting altogether.

Yes.

Hell, one of the lead contributors to Lemmy and an admin of lemmy.ml is like this. If that person sees you say anything negative about China, you instantly get banned.

If I'm understanding what you're saying then yes, you are wrong about this.

I hosted my own instance and was able to see the usernames of people who voted on communities that were not hosted on my instance. To prove my point, I had posted the list of votes on a comment that was claiming it was impossible to do this.

Yes, as the other person said, you need to be an admin or mod. As an admin, you have raw database access. I crafted an SQL query using a couple of joins of I think 3 tables, and I was able to provide a comment or post ID, and it would return a list of people who have upvoted or downvoted it.

The problem is though that anyone can be an admin. You could set up your own instance and do this if you want.

Votes being public is one of my main turn offs of Lemmy. Anyone can host their own instance that federates with everyone and peek inside the database and see everything you've ever up voted or downvoted. I have personally done this just to confirm my suspicions that it is possible. I don't vote on a lot of things I otherwise would because I don't want people making assumptions about me. For example, if I see a copy/paste bot spamming a pro trans comment, even though I agree with the message, I might want to downvote because it is a spam bot. But I'm afraid that if someone sees that comment in a list of my downvotes without any context, they will incorrectly think I'm transphobic.